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Originally Posted by burnitdown
I disagree. I think GMs are showing restraint when it comes to the 2nd/3rd line forwards and 2nd/3rd pairing defencemen...but when it comes to skilled 1st line players, the stars are getting more and more money each year. Toews and Kane's contracts just raised the stakes again...
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Toews and Kane are massively overpaid. All the scuttlebutt is about how Stan Bowman signed those deals in the expectation that the cap would be substantially higher this year. If it had been, he would not have had to jettison a quarter of his roster to become compliant.
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Not to mention, there'll be a lot of additional revenue coming and competition amongst teams in free agency once the NHL expands and they collect money from the World Cup. I don't think revenues are flatlining at all.
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It's an open question whether the expansion teams will bring in above-average revenue. Quebec probably will – but that depends on the value of the Canadian dollar. Las Vegas probably won't. Either way, those two teams
cannot make a big enough difference to the top line to move the cap much.
As for the World Cup, how much HRR is that anyway? Take one tournament with a small number of games; divide it by 32 teams, and then divide by 4 again because it only happens every four years. Again, that's not going to move the cap much.
The NHL's fundamental financial constraints are not about to change. The league is heavily dependent upon gate revenue, and since ticket prices are already sky-high (compared to the other major North American team sports), the gate is highly vulnerable to setbacks in the economy. That's what we're seeing now. If not for the NHLPA invoking the 5 percent escalator clause, the cap would actually have gone
down this season. There is no guarantee that it will go up in any particular year. A lot of teams are handcuffed now by contracts signed under the assumption that it would always go up.